La Noel Therrien

We went to Welland to visit my mom's family yesterday to celebrate Christmas together. The afternoon involved a lot more English than I'm used to when I visit them but it was a lot of fun, despite the smaller group this year. I missed it last year because I was in Florida visiting my dad's parents so it was nice to see them all again now.

As expected, here are some of my preferred pictures from our time there. Ceci, c'est moi avec mes grandparents. (Me and my grandparents, natch.)

Moi, mon frere et mon grandpapa. (Me, my brother and my grandfather.)

These two were having too much fun giggling amongst themselves...

Les belles filles...

Et les...garcons.

By the way, I took my sister to see The Pursuit of Happyness tonight (link). I loved it. It was nice to see a picture of some of the ideas that I've had in my head regarding homelessness. I bought the original book two weeks ago as well so I'm looking forward to reading that.

Happy birthday, Ashleigh! I wish you happiness and blessing for all of 2007.

And now, I'm off to pack for my three day New Year's trip to Montreal. On y va!

The View From Here

Inscrutable. It's a word that I would use for the fact that some people find me hard to read. I don't usually wear my emotions on my sleeve and my facial expressions can be, um, inexpressive.

Granted, this trait can be annoying. I've had enough people comment on this and I have put some effort into modifying this behaviour. Back at AV-Base, Susan used to mock me whenever she saw me in a meeting, crossing her arms and furrowing her brow mightily behind my back. I tend to stare into space while I'm thinking, chomping on a pen and then jotting notes on my clipboard. It can be a little "intense," as people have said. Lindsay got a kick out of comparing me to Christopher Walken.

The positive side is that there are many times when it serves me very well to not express an instant opinion with my body language. During emotional and angry confrontations, I am very likely to remain calm and try to work through the issues. During emergency situations, like getting cut off while driving, it allows me to deal with the situation at hand. During the work day when someone challenges one of my cherished ideas, it allows me to consider the pros and cons before responding. And when I'm hanging out with someone that likes to sing off-key for hours at a time, I don't get easily frustrated.

That's the outer side of me. Inside my head, I act like a big data collector. I just suck in all of the information that I can get. I let it wander through this software matrix in my head and I eventually provide my response. I weigh the positives and negatives, I consider the source of the information, I let the emotional factors mix things up, I parse it all and I came out with a result.

Not that everyone likes the result, as we saw with this post. I can seem to be a little too formulaic, a little too controlling, a little too calculated. (I prefer the terms "self controlled" and "teachable.") I mean, how can I so callously break all of my friends up into little groups with nice labels and then somehow decide who gets to use up most of my spare time?

Allow me to shed some light on that. As I have mentioned here recently, I have done a few personality tests on this blog before. I did the Jung typology test and came out as an ISTJ, as described here in detail (or maybe on INTJ).

To quote the above description, "ISTJs often give the initial impression of being aloof and perhaps somewhat cold." We just want the facts, ma'am. The world is logical and there are patterns everywhere. Everything should fit into some big picture.

So my "circles of friends" post was an excellent glimpse into how I process life. To go back further, I had this post in which I dissected my top priorities in life. The way I do this and the reasons that I work this way are all related to my personality type. This permits me to excel in my chosen career and design great software. It's one of the main reasons that I have been able write so many blog posts over the past few years.

Even so, many other people do not think about life in the same way. They do not share my value system or my personality traits, nor should they since we are all different. The danger is that we then declare someone else's personality type as "wrong" and ours as "right." We judge the way that other people judge and we ironically make a judgment against ourselves in the process. The key is that we need to learn how to understand and even appreciate the way that other people approach life.

(Heh. You could say that I have judged the ones that judge the other judges. Oy vey. That's definitely not where I was heading with that.)

My point is this: I look at the world through my own unique eyes. My perspective is different from yours and everything looks a little different to me. That's the view from here.

Worship Anywhere

This past week, I've had the opportunity to participate in worship in a number of different settings. To take my cue from my Christmas solo, I wanted to review the different ways that I worship the King of Kings, especially since it's Christmas day today.

Christmas Choir
I was able to worship as a member of the choir in the tenor section and as the lead soloist for the song "Majesty." This can be a little tricky since the choir has to be expressive without being distracting and we need to focus on the choir director, but it has the benefits of including a very high level of technical skill. As the soloist, I had more freedom to act out my love for God. I think that we were successfully able to get past the restrictions of a "performance" and get to the heart of worship for some of our songs.

Recording a CD
I've done this in two ways. Most recently during the summer, I played percussion and sang backup vocals for the latest CD from my church. We did most of these songs in small pieces according to a regimented plan. I think that the final CD came out well but the process doesn't lend itself easily to passionate worship. Before that, I have recorded two personal worship CDs. In those cases, I purposely did both instruments and vocals all together. This lent itself to more spontaneous worship at the cost of some technical skill.

Worship Team at GTA
This is where I most frequently get to lead worship as part of a team. I play percussion most frequently and I sing backup tenor vocals a little less often. Generally speaking, we only do three or four songs in any given service, which contrasts greatly with a church like Open Door that can easily spend forty-five minutes in worship. I've done both of those styles for years at different times in my life. Despite the more limited time, I still put my whole self into the worship. I almost always dance around as I'm playing the congas and I sometimes even play congas with one hand while lifting my other hand up to God.

Worship with the Young Adults
Because this is a much smaller group, playing percussion and singing in this setting tends to be more intimate. Fortunately, our group is particularly active during worship and people will frequently stand up or dance or whatever without specific instructions to do so. Playing worship at camp site during the summer is always memorable. One time, I was even able to lead an "experimental" worship set with everyone using percussion only.

Leading Worship
I do not get to lead worship very often anymore as the primary leader. I did get the chance to do so last month for Young Adults and I relished the chance to dust off my piano and play by myself. I usually like to prepare a set of potential songs and then I'm flexible during the worship time to discard songs as I prefer. I like the chance to lead because it allows me more freedom to do some free-flow spontaneous stuff, though this is sometimes restricted depending on the band that I have with me. My absolute favourite time to lead worship is after a service when people are praying. At times like that, I get the chance to minister to people in song without the focus being on me or the music.

Teaching Worship
Back at FCCC, I led and taught the youth worship team for about two years. In this setting, I intentionally pushed people on the technical side and on the spiritual side. Learning the listen to musical cues was important but so was listening to spiritual cues from the Holy Spirit. I used a variety of different methods as experiments, tests and training, with the goal of allowing them to eventually lead worship without me helping in any way.

During this time, I also gave little two-minute talks showing some of the principles of worship from the Bible. Back at LGT when I was twenty years old, I was involved in the Discipleship Training School (DTS) as a leader. During this time, I led the preliminary worship with CD music and then I had a five minute teaching session about worship. Unfortunately, I lost most of my notes from that era but some people have come up to me years later and told me about certain parts of those lessons that they still use to this day.

Member of Congregation
Funny enough, I probably do this less often than any other form of worship. I'm usually participating in a worship team so it's a rare thing when I can just sit with the crowd. When I do get the chance to do this, I sometimes prefer to sit and worship without singing, just as a different way to express my love for God.

In My Van
Since I live in Dorchester, it generally takes me twenty minutes or more to get to most locations in town. I have plenty of time to listen to praise and worship music. This past week, I have been listening to Kirk Franklin's "Hero." There's one part in which he tells the listener to keep one hand on the steering wheel and raise the other hand up. You can often find me doing just that, or sometimes I'll use my steering wheel for percussion and sing rather loudly. People driving beside me probably think I'm a little weird.

In My Bed
Once in a while, I finish dreaming and I wake up with a new worship song in my head. Due to my sleepful state, I don't always manage to get up and record the new song on my tape recorder but I try to do that. Beyond that, I will sometimes raise my hands to God while lying in bed. A little one-on-one can be pretty powerful.

Intentional Friendships

Back in February 2005, I wrote this post in which I describe "Three Crucial People." To recap, every Christian needs three kinds of Godly relationships:

1. A spiritual parent, someone who mentors us.
2. A spiritual friend, someone who walks beside us.
3. A spiritual child, someone that we mentor.

The concept of a mentor and the concept of discipling someone is somewhat foreign in our North American church these days. To go even further, many people find the idea to be subtly offensive. If we desire to be a mentor, we seem to be placing ourselves on some pedestal. If we want to mentor someone else, that seems to be a judgment against them about their spiritual maturity. Either way, people don't really want any part of it even if we agree that it's a good Biblical principle (as I wrote about here).

And so we default to some other vague plan. We wait for God to work things out and bring someone into our lives. We wait for someone to come to us and ask for us to become their mentors. We wait for someone to come along and offer to become our mentors. And you know what? These kinds of relationships very rarely "just happen."

In my opinion, I think that we need to be very intentional regarding the friendships and relationships that we develop. We need to look for the lonely person and offer them a ride to church. We need to purposely talk about serious issues with our closest friends. We have to choose to open up some private areas of our lives to our close friends. We need to specifically create an environment to let our friends open up about their lives and trust us.

I, for one, have not functioned well as a pinball in the game of life. Simply bouncing from friendship to friendship and from paddle to paddle left me feeling empty. It left me doubtful about what the purpose of my friendships was. I found that I sometimes learned major things about my friends years later to which I was oblivious - so how well did I know my own friends after all?

As Christians, we often give lip service to the concept of small groups and discipleship, to the call of the Great Commission. We say that young Christians should have someone to help them along but then we send them to Bible Study and Sunday services and think that they will be fine. We appreciate the wisdom of older people but then relegate them to groups of people their own age.

These things to do not just happen. We need to create opportunities by inviting people into our homes. We need to devote our personal time to certain people. We need to ask someone to challenge us about our own lives.

Intentional friendships.

Circles of Friends

Back when I was twenty-one years old, I came to the realisation that my friendships were too superficial and that I needed to develop deeper relationships. I needed to actually talk about meaningful issues with my friends and we needed to help each other grow in real and practical ways. So around that time, I started a small group for a few guys that I knew.

This "cell group" was focused on two aspects: Our spiritual growth and our friendship. We would have Bible studies and prayer and discussion, and then we would balance that by simply hanging out, eating snacks and playing video games or pool.

I quickly learned one thing, though: I couldn't be close friends with everyone. Despite my intentions, it became clear that I simply didn't have enough time to hang out with each guy individually on a consistant basis and build one-on-one friendships with everyone. I tried to do that at first but I just didn't have enough time every week to do that.

In my search for balance in terms of the number of friends, I came back to Jesus' example with his disciples. He had twelve disciples that he had around him regularly. However, there were three disciples that he singled out as close friends: Peter, James and John. (For example, they stayed close to him when Jesus prayed in Gethsemane in Mark 14.)

The Inner Circle of Friends
So over the past few years since that time, I have tried to acknowledge that I am limited in terms of how much time I can devote to my closest friends. While I hang out with a lot of people and have many friends, I recognize that I can only have a few really close friends. Over the years, the list of my closest friends has changed a bit but right now, I would say that I have three very close friends.

I don't necessarily get to hang out with each of these friends regularly but there's enough of a bond there so that when we do get together, we can talk about almost anything. I can openly tell them about the things that I'm struggling with and they can freely challenge me about issues or plans in my life. I love this "inner circle" of friends.

The Outer Circle of Friends
I also have a larger circle of friends with whom I have a long history. I hang out with these friends less frequently but we often have certain key things that we can talk about in depth. I can chat with former co-workers about the rigours of professional life. I can chat with old friends about their future plans and goals in life. We're not completely open about everything but there are certain areas that are important to us.

This circle is the trickiest one. I don't think that everyone necessarily uses my perception of the levels of friendship. Some people would like to hang out constantly with a wide circle of friends. I frequently get requests to spend time with people from this group. This is fine because I want to spent time with them as well. In fact, I currently have a pending list of five people that I have vague plans to see in January.

The issue is that I will not allow this outer circle to take more time from me than my inner circle. That makes sense, right? I should spend more time with my closest friends. However, there are a lot more friends in this larger circle. If I devote only a small percentage of my time to each of them, I will quickly run out of all of my free time. So mathematically speaking, I have to intentionally say no to some requests from this circle. I like these friends and it would be very nice to hang out with them more frequently, it's just not feasible on a regular basis and that's an annoying lesson that I had to learn.

I (used to?) try and facilitate social events so that other Christian guys from this circle could develop some friendships between each other. I figured that since I don't have time for everyone but everyone still needs some close friends, I would create opportunities for others to develop those friendships. Funny enough, I didn't see this approach actually work much for whatever unknown reasons.

The Circle of Acquaintances
Beyond that, I have a very wide circle of more casual acquaintances. This includes co-workers, people on the worship team at church, friends-of-friends, etc. Most often, I only see these friends during my regular weekly activities. There isn't much motivation to spend personal time together beyond that.

I assume that people have other views and approaches regarding the friendships in their lives. I would be interested in hearing other ideas about all of this, but at least I can explain where I'm coming from.

King of Heaven

For your viewing pleasure, I have a few pictures that I have selected from the "King of Heaven" Christmas performances these past two weekends. There are a few more pictures on facebook.com, if you're on there. At the wrap party yesterday, we got to see the DVD from the performance on Monday December 11th. I do have a copies of the two DVDs, if anyone wants an unofficial personal copy later.

Links & Blinks

Bwahaha! We have sucked another person into our blog circle. Welcome, Cam!

For the record, I have several goals in writing this blog. My main purpose is that I want to have a record of my own personal and spiritual growth. Granted, that can be a bit tricky with really personal issues but many of my life lessons are free for the taking. My secondary purpose is to keep my friends updated with my latest news. My final purpose is to entertain my audience, which is why I like to flip between serious blog posts and posts like this one.

Speaking of entertainment, did you see this article from last week? Recently in China, they had two dolphins in an aquarium that had swallowed some plastic and were quite sick. They were unable to use their medical instruments to extract the plastic because of the dolphins' gagging action. They decided to think outside of the box and called in the world's tallest man - a guy that is 7 foot eight inches in height and also lived nearby. With his Plastic Man capabilities, he reached right into their stomaches through their mouths and took out the pieces. Problem solved! And we all wondered what the guy's porpoise in life was...

As for the latest news, we'll have our final Christmas performances this Saturday-Sunday-Monday. We're expecting standing room only for the final two shows so get there early for a good seat.

This past Friday night, AV-Base hosted our Christmas party at a restaurant downtown that had a Murder Mystery dinner. Even though I'm not working at AV-Base anymore, I still had the privilege of joining them. It was a fun evening even if the actors interrupted our dinner a little too frequently. Kudos to Tara, who stole the show a few times, both on purpose and by accident. Does anyone have pics that they can e-mail to me from the evening?

Actively Patient

Yesterday I had the chance to get together with my new co-workers to chat, do a little Bible study and pray. It's a pleasure to be able to do that as part of my professional duties.

As a startup company, we still have a variety of things that we need to complete and this process has taken a fair bit of time. I've been involved since the idea was first suggested to me in July 2006. Steve, as one of the major partners, has been heavily involved for around a year now (or more), helping developing the Business Plan and all of that. Rick, as the original founder, has been developing ideas for the company since 2003, and before that when he first hurt in 1996.

In short, patience has been very important.

From Psalm 40, we were reminded that patience is more than just waiting. It involves prayer and crying out to God. It means that we need to place our full trust in God even when plans aren't working out as well as we had hoped. And oftentimes, we need to work hard while we're waiting, to prepare for the eventual goal.

This lesson applies to several other key areas of my life. Patience is not the expectation that everything will work out by itself. It doesn't mean that we have no part to play in planning and preparation. We just need to make sure that we aren't putting our own plans ahead of God's. We need to make sure that our goals are a reflection of God's ideals and not just our personal dreams. We need to make sure that we let God accomplish things in his own way without us getting in the way.

Patience is the pursuit of God's will and God's timing. We need to be actively patient.

Worship: Friend of God

Yesterday with the Young Adults group at nine20, I led the worship set by myself. I brought along my piano keyboard and we managed to figure out the sound system by ourselves with our usual techies. It's been a long time since I have played the piano and it's been a long time since I led worship by myself. I'm sure I was pretty rusty but I got through it fairly well and I think that God used the music to touch people that were there. Wow, have I ever missed doing this kind of thing.

Since my new job allows me to work from home for the next month or two, I have been using a bit of time in the afternoons to start using my piano again. I usually can't practice at home because I don't want to wake anyone up in the morning and people are always around in the evening, but now I have an empty house in the middle of the day so I've picked it up again. That's one thing that I have been anticipating since I resigned from my previous job.

The focus of our worship time was on two songs that talk about how we can be friends with God. Jesus isn't a mythical figure, he's a real person that we can talk to and that talks to us. Granted, it's a little odd to speak into the air, as it were, but once you really know God personally it's amazing to see how much he loves us. We can be a real friend of God.

As for other music, if anyone is planning to come to any of the six upcoming Christmas performances at my church (as I mentioned here), I recommend that you sit on the right hand side. From your vantage point, I will be on the left side of the stage ("stage right") and you won't be able to see me if you're sitting on the left side because of the set. Also, the performance is about two hours long.

A Life: Chaplin, Lindbergh and Christ

Yesterday with the Young Adults at nine20, we had a guest speaker named Maurice (or "Fernie" as his nickname). The guy is 86 years old and he was born in Trinidad. He related stories of seeing Charles Lindbergh's plane flying overhead when he was a young boy (as mentioned here), which is just amazing.

He talked about seeing some of the original Charlie Chaplin silent movies. After one show, Maurice's brother asked him if he wanted to play Charlie Chaplin. Maurice joined in, at which point his brother took out a hammer and BAM! He hit him square in the head with it. Of course, it wasn't like the movies where you stumble around. Maurice just ended up in bloody pain and he still has that dent to this day. As he said, take this as a lesson: the media does effect kids.

Maurice related other stories from his life. He eventually become the CEO of Johnson & Johnson in the Caribbean. At the age of 56, he had a heart attack and that's when the company moved him to North America, to look over his health and to give him a different job here. At the age of 62, he faced mandatory retirement but he still wanted to be useful and do something. So with his golden parachute he decided to open a chain of five women's clothing boutiques with his wife.

Unfortunately, they lost everything when the stores eventually failed. His wife was forced to go back to college to try to begin a new career but that didn't work out, either. Eventually, his wife ended up finding a job with Harvey & Howard and through this, Maurice and his wife started to go to the weekly Alpha dinner/seminar. As he said, if the boss invites you to dinner than it's a command performance and you darn well better go.

The Alpha course involves a friendly meal followed by a short video and discussion about what the Bible says about Jesus and God. It does a wonderful job of allowing people to openly ask the tough questions about Christianity and other religions and deal with their own lives. And so, at the ripe old age of 75, Maurice and his wife eventually gave their hearts to God and put their faith in Jesus Christ. Maurice was still plagued with doubts about his usefulness at such an old age but over the past seven years, God has been using him to reach out to young and old people alike and really show them what life is all about. It took him a while to get here but this is a man with a purpose now! He's a fascinating guy.

Three Hundred

I have been writing this blog since April 6, 2004. I wrote 70 posts in 2004, 147 posts in 2005 and I'm up to 83 posts in 2006. To celebrate my three hundredth post, I have updated my blog template. The Archive section in the right-hand menu is now grouped by year and I have new Blog Labels that I have started to implement. (I made no colour changes, I like to keep the visuals simple and clean.)

As a summary of my blog life, I want to highlight the Top 10 posts that I have written about lessons that I have learned. These are not necessarily my favourite posts and I've certainly learned some crucial things about which I have never written. Still, one of my main purposes for this blog is to use it as an online journal of my personal and spiritual growth and that's why this list is so important to me.

10. Personality Traits
I periodically do some self-analysis just to learn more about myself. In this post, I dissected the fact that many personality traits have both a good side and a bad side and maturity means accentuating the beneficial parts while softening the hard edge. In this post, I reviewed my own personality traits to see how each was useful and harmful. I've also done some Jung Tests, analyzed my conversation skills (and here), talked about my introversion and how I came to be the strong and silent type. As I said before, I think that Christians are naturally trained to analyze themselves regularly.

9. Big Brothers
In September 2005, I found that I had a deep desire for mentoring but no outlet. I was done leading my own cell group, the youth worship team at FCCC was over and my youngest friends had all grown up. That's when I accidentally bumped into the idea of becoming a Big Brother. In January 2006, I finally got around to attending some meetings and I did an interview with them. This is the post in which I announced that I was now a Big. I've been hanging out with my Little once a week ever since then (more than a year and a half now) and I love him.

8. Swim Deeper
In this post, I interpreted a dream that I had as a message from God. We need to explore our lives until we have found our calling and purpose. Once we have it, we need to get deeper into it and we can't remain superficial, floating around on the surface. As I look at this, I recognize that this is a post that I should review more regularly since I needed this reminder today. In this case, though, the message wasn't as important to me as the method. I frequently have dreams that I do not understand and some of these dreams actually end up happening later, which is just weird. This is the first time that I am certain that God spoke to me through a dream, though.

7. Spiritual Power
Over the last year, I have been randomly asking people these questions: As a Christian, have you been baptized in the Holy Spirit? Do you speak in tongues? Do you speak in tongues regularly? I followed that up with some analysis (here and here), though not everyone agreed with my conclusions given the various types of theologies amongst my readers. Where is the power in our Christian lives? Are we just nice people doing good deeds or does God really show up in our lives? We need more of the Holy Spirit and my challenge to myself and others is to not accept a mediocre faith in God.

6. Change For The Sake Of Others
In this post, I talk about the Biblical mandate to change aspects about ourselves, to develop new skills or interests and to let go of some of our minor rules. We do this so that we can communicate and relate to others better. If we insist on doing things our own way all the time and refuse to change, it can be very tough to develop relationships with people. We need to compromise ourselves.

5. On The Margins
As a member of Abe's small group for two years or so, he impressed upon me the importance of reaching out to people on the margins of our society. I followed up on that idea by talking about how spending time with people is more important giving money.

4. Leadership Growth Spurt
This post talks about how leaders will naturally grow and learn through their roles as leaders. More than that, I suggested that everyone needs to be become a leader at some point, because it's our responsibility and because there is only so much personal growth we can acheive as followers. I described one aspect of my own growth as a leader in terms of realizing that encouragement from a leader is crucial.

3. Lessons of Discipleship
I told my story about how I came to realize, at the age of twenty-one, that I needed to develop more meaningful friendships and that I remain so superficial. I gradually saw the need for mentors and I decided to jump into the pool and become one myself rather than wait for one to come to me. This two part series (Part I and Part II) summarizes some of the lessons I learned over the years while trying to be a mentor to others.

2. Lessons From The Office
During 2005, I started to make the link between lessons that I had learned in my professional life with lessons that applied to my spiritual life. I started to see how alike churches and businesses can be. I began this series to get some of those lessons down as text and I have now grouped all of those posts into my new "Professional Life" blog label. I would highlight this post about the fact that everyone has an emotional bank account and we need to be aware of how our actions effect the morale of others.

1. Character & Hope
In this post, I talk about the biggest lesson that I ever learned from my professional career. Character is what you develop in the tough times. By my estimation, this was one of the darkest and most frustrating times of my life. On an emotional basis, this was the hardest thing that I ever had to learn and it took an awfully long time for me to learn it. I can only thank God that he led me through that period and made something good come of it.

How Did I Get Here?

Throughout my grade school and high school years, I thought that God was calling me into full-time Christian ministry. Missionary work, worshiop ministry, pastoral work, something like that. In my late teenage years, I was quite surprised when God told me not to go to Bible College, as I had expected and planned. So instead, I decided to go to Fanshawe College and become a computer programmer for a few years just to earn a buck. Since I had only taken one programming course during high school, it wasn't exactly a sure-fire idea. It just seemed like a satisfactory interim plan.

So I worked at AV-Base Systems for almost eight years. That was much longer than I expected and many times, I felt like I was treading water. Why wasn't I moving forward? What was the point of being a computer programmer? What was God's calling for me? I didn't let those questions stop me entirely since I continued to be involved in discipleship, church leadership, worship ministry and Big Brothers throughout that period. Even so, my plan of making some money and then moving on certainly wasn't working out.

It seems that God's plans were - and are - much bigger than my own. It's only within this past year that I have started to realize how well my professional skills can translate to my spiritual ministry. It's only within the past year that I have started to see the parallels between a company and a church. God has been preparing me all along and I'm just now starting to see part of the plans that he has for me.

Most obviously, my professional skills will be useful in terms of developing my new company as we help severely disabled people deal with denied insurance claims. I did not imagine that my professional skills would be part of my spiritual ministry and it's amazing that this opportunity was handed to me. I've always been a little jealous of people like Abe or Richard that can work as nurses or social workers and can minister to people as part of their jobs, but I didn't realize that this could be available to me in my chosen career as well.

Beyond that, my philosophies as a Project Manager and supervisor can be quite useful within a church. My abilities to logically evaluate a situation and look for the best solutions can be useful within a church. My experience with the headaches of helping a new company grow can be directly applied to helping a church grow. And I'm not just limited to functioning inside one church or just within one company, I can see other opportunities outside of those boxes as well.

It's mind blowing, I tells ya. God's an ever-lovin' genius who had all of this plotted out before I was even born. So how did I get here? It's all God. It's all because of God.

P.S. By coincidence, here is one of the passages that I was reading during my morning Bible study today: "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith...For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." Ephesians 2:8-10

Christmas Presentation

To make the official anouncement, everyone is invited to come to my church this Christmas season to see this year's Christmas presentation. The dramatic portion is narrated by the Little Drummer Boy and it centres around King Herod, the Wise Men and baby Jesus. And yes, Tara has a small role in this play. I've seen an early preview and it has some pretty funny bits. I mean, how often do you reference the Three Stooges at Christmas time?

We also have a full choir with music that comes in between scenes. I'm in the tenor section and I also have a solo during one of the climatic songs.

Here are the details. It runs on the evenings of December 9 - 11 and 16 - 18 for around an hour and a half. I recommend arriving about one hour early because every performance is usually full. Admission is free, natch.